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Robin Ash has just been promoted to Chief Operating Officer of Printzhof Press and Vice President of its parent company, Education and Entertainment Holdings, Inc. Her first objective is to create an action plan that will achieve two seemingly contradictory corporate objectives: transform Printzhof into an aggressively competitive 21st century educational publisher while maintaining its close-knit and collaborative culture. Because of new technologies changing how information is delivered and used in higher education, the need for the company to evolve along with the publishing industry is obvious to Ash and other company leaders. However, Printzhof's history of success has resulted in resistance to organizational change among many longtime employees and senior managers. Still, Ash must revitalize Printzhof without destroying employee morale and loyalty. How far and how fast should she move on the critical priorities she has identified?

In early 2013, the ongoing controversy involving cyclist Lance Armstrong's use of performance-enhancing drugs was taking its toll on the nonprofit LIVESTRONG Foundation, which Armstrong himself had founded years before after being diagnosed with cancer. Armstrong had already been stripped of his titles, including six Tour de France medals, and was about to appear on a television interview where he presumably would admit to doping. LIVESTRONG CEO Doug Ulman and his leadership team had to figure out how to meet the various challenges that now confronted the organization: a continued drain on the organization's time and energy, bad publicity, media scrutiny, and the erosion of financial support. The organization had helped hundreds of thousands of cancer survivors over the years and Ulman and the others wanted to make sure that LIVESTRONG remained strong and viable.

In the fall of 2012, Dr. Andres Alonso had much to celebrate about in his five-year tenure as CEO of Baltimore City Public Schools, including the approval and implementation of an innovative teachers' contract with a jointly-governed four-tier career pathway that tied teacher pay and promotion to performance and peer review. Nonetheless, Alonso was concerned about the future of the contract and the reforms it introduced. It took two votes before the teachers ratified the contract in November 2010. Since then, implementation had been laborious, complicated, and uncertain. many questions would have to be answered in the coming months. Was the district making the transition to a contract that rewarded "engagement" in a career pathway rather than passive reliance on steps and lanes? Were the processes for earning Achievement Units and progressing through the pathways rigorous enough so that the contract wouldn't default to the past practice where everyone moves up and earns more money? Were the joint governance structures established to direct and manage the career pathways, pay system, and peer-review process working effectively? How did the new system support the district's underlying theory of change?

Omar Ishrak, Medtronic's first non-American CEO, aims to reinvigorate the medical device maker's growth by focusing on emerging markets, therapy innovation, and creative business models. In 2012, budget constraints in mature economies, the lack of new medical therapies coming to market, and the decline in growth of Medtronic's core businesses has reduced the company's once dynamic growth close to zero. As the newly appointed CEO, Ishrak faces the formidable challenge of restoring the company's growth. In his first 18 months as CEO, he has laid the groundwork for future growth by ramping up R&D investment in breakthrough therapy innovations. To bolster Medtronic's near-term prospects, he has supported creative product and business model innovations aimed at overcoming adoption barriers in emerging economies. Ishrak restructured his executive team and their responsibilities: the heads of Medtronic's global operating regions and major countries, who previously reported to the head of international, now report directly to the CEO, putting seven non-Americans on the excecutive committee. In another important milestone, Medtronic acquired a Chinese orthopedics company, which became its first fully integrated business unit outside the U.S. Ishrak is trying to decide whether these steps are sufficient to transform Medtronic from a multinational into a truly global company and restore its growth.

Coach Bob Hurley of St. Anthony High School is one of the winningest coaches in the history of high school basketball. At age 65, he has won more than 1,000 games and 25 New Jersey State Championships. His players come from the toughtest streets in the country and yet all but 3 have gone on to college. As head coach, he earns less than $10,000 a year; his circa 1917 school building doesn't even have a gym. And yet, for almost 40 years he has turned down all offers to leave a small, aging, catholic school in Jersey City, NJ. This is biographical case about a tough-love leader who epitomizes what it means to be authentic. It was written for a course on authentic leadership development to highlight the origins and potential of deep self-knowledge and passion. Class discussion focuses on the tensions between extrinsic and intrinsic motivations and the role that this plays in our lives.

This case describes the strategic and organizational challenges that Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL) faced at the turn of the millennium. Until then, JLL sold piecemeal commercial real estate services to its corporate clients, who maintained relationships with a variety of vendors. In 2000, JLL's large corporate clients started globalizing their activities and seeking to outsource their real estate needs. They were looking for integrated solutions delivered through a single point of contact, and they cut their providers to a few strategic vendors. JLL's organizational structure, configured around largely autonomous service lines, was not well suited to supporting the development of integrated services. Executive Peter Barge was put in charge of a new team, called Corporate Solutions, whose mission was to draw connections between the service lines in order to foster integration. How should Barge structure Corporate Solutions to make sure it succeeds in its mission? And how should he configure the group's ties to the service lines to ensure their collaboration? The retention of JLL's most profitable clients was at stake. This case is the first in a series that also comprises cases B, C, and D and collectively covers JLL's evolution between the years 1999 and 2012.

This case describes the strategic and organizational challenges that Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL) faced between 2001 and 2005. Faced with the need to deliver integrated services to corporate clients in 2001, JLL created Corporate Solutions, a group that aimed to draw connections between JLL's semi-autonomous service lines. Despite initial success, by 2005 the group was finding it challenging to foster integration. Account managers and service line leaders clashed as decision-making power, pay and incentives, and clout were altered and redistributed. JLL realized that its organizational structure was hindering the firm in achieving key strategic goals, such as rapid scalability of corporate accounts and effective local market penetration. America's CEO Peter Roberts outlines the alternatives JLL's top management analyzed as they considered how to move the organization forward. This case is the second in a case series that also comprises cases A, C, and D, and collectively covers JLL's evolution between the years 1999 and 2012.

This case describes the strategic and organizational challenges that Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL) faced between 2005 and 2008. Having dismantled its long-standing service-line-oriented structure, JLL created two interdependent groups: Accounts and Markets. Accounts housed account managers who served JLL's corporate clients. Markets housed brokers specialized in a certain geography. JLL helped drive integration between Accounts and Markets by emphasizing work at the "intersections" between both groups, i.e., instances that required combining both groups' resources. By 2008, however, JLL was facing challenges associated with harnessing the potential of this new structure. There was more growth that could be obtained from penetrating local markets, and top management wondered how to best strengthen their brokerage team. The acquisition of Spaulding and Slye, a renowned Boston-based firm, provided instant growth in some key markets, but organic growth was harder to achieve. While the industry paid brokers with a commission model, JLL did so with a salary and bonus model that aligned well with JLL's culture but proved unattractive to new recruits. America's CEO Peter Roberts outlines the alternatives JLL analyzed as they considered how to strengthen the organization while maintaining its values and integrity. This case is the third in a case series that also comprises cases A, B, and D, and collectively covers JLL's evolution between the years 1999 and 2012.

This case describes the strategic and organizational challenges that Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL) faced between 2008 and 2012. In 2008, in order to strengthen the firm's brokerage team, JLL merged with The Staubach Company, a real estate services provider with a first-rate brokerage team and great cultural fit with JLL. Staubach paid its brokers with a commission model, which accelerated JLL's decision to let go of its long-standing salary and bonus approach. The merger also surfaced two interesting business opportunities. First, local brokers were now empowered and motivated to open up their client relationships to the rest of the company, growing their business from just local transactions to the full array of services JLL provided. Second, local brokers became aware of a great number of mid-sized clients whose real estate needs were not as sophisticated as those of large corporate accounts but who required multi-service solutions in selected geographies. JLL thus created a group called Markets Corporate Solutions, which specifically targeted mid-sized clients. Toward 2012, with its organizational structure expanding to tackle opportunities for multiple types of clients in a myriad of geographies, JLL was facing challenges associated with managing internal and external complexity. America's CEO Peter Roberts outlines the opportunities and challenges that lied ahead for JLL. This is the final case in a series that also comprises cases A, B, and C, and collectively covers JLL's evolution between the years 1999 and 2012.

The generation born in China in the 1980s has become an important force in the country's labour market. Members of this generation were the first to grow up in a market economy with daily access to the Internet, and are considered to have different work values than past generations. Also, most were born and raised in single-child families and generally demonstrate more individualistic behaviours and less willingness to follow the norms of previous generations. This case describes the promotion story of Zhu Dandan, a member of the 1980s generation, and illustrates the different work values, behaviours and management style of her generation, as well as the challenges of managing it.

In the spring of 2012, the president of Encylopaedia Britannica announced that the company would cease producing bound volumes of the iconic reference work. Some people were shocked, and many assumed that EB had buckled under the internet--specifically, Wikipedia. EB's content model was dismissed as "vintage." What many people didn't know was that sales of the print set were by then responsible for only 1% of the business. The decision to stop printing it was, the author writes, "a nonevent." The encyclopedia's famous door-to-door sales force had reached its peak in 1990 with 100,000 units sold. But then the business collapsed. Busy families had less patience for personal solicitations, and personal computers had started shipping with CD-ROM drives, which created a demand for multimedia and interactivity--unknown territory for print-focused editorial and product teams. By 1996, the year Cauz joined the company, sales were down to 3,000 units. This is the story of how Encylopaedia Britannica became savvy--first with CD-ROM, then with the internet, and finally with the learning business. Wikipedia's success reinforced EB's strategic decision to reduce reliance on consumer reference and accelerate activity in the K-12 market. The company aggressively overhauled its editorial operation; now content is updated on Britannica Online every 20 minutes. Today, the author writes, the business is growing on all measures: revenue, margins, staff, content, and reach.

You have an idea for an innovative project that could have a significant impact on your business. But you also suspect that your idea will meet internal resistance: If realized, it would upend the status quo, and if you were to send it through the regular process for creating new projects, other parts of the organization would probably try to kill it along the way. So what's your next step? The conventional answer is to get a mandate from the top. This strategy, however, carries its own set of risks. In most large firms, CEOs are constantly barraged with ideas for new projects, and most often, they give the pitches a five-minute perusal followed by a "no." And even if you do get the support from the top, the corporate spotlight can be a dangerous place for young, unproven ideas. In this article, authors Paddy Miller and Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg propose a different way to get your idea off the starting block: stealth innovation. They describe how to nurture your idea under the radar, which involves facing four key challenges: finding allies who can support you on the sly; building a proof of concept; accessing funds on the quiet; and developing a good cover story to deflect unwanted early attention from your idea.

New research finds that the longer a CEO is in office, the stronger the company-employee relationship becomes--but after a time, the company-customer relationship weakens because of changes in how CEOs learn over the course of their tenure.

A visual depiction of the minute-by-minute computer use of two workers--one who is relatively focused and stays on task, one who switches between activities constantly. The lesson: Sticking to one thing at a time means you'll get much more done.

Supplement for case 412002

Eight women had first enrolled in Harvard Business School's traditional MBA program in 1963. By 2013, the number of women in the MBA classroom had reached 40%. The 50th anniversary of women's enrollment in the traditional MBA program gave HBS Dean Nitin Nohria the opportunity to take stock of the progress that had been made by HBS women students and alumnae and ponder what still remained to be done. The case examines the evolving experiences of male and female MBAs over the decades through interviews with dozens of HBS alumni, as well as the experiences of female faculty at the School. The case scrutinizes a number of issues facing professional women, such as changing definitions of success and diversity, barriers faced by women at work, the expectations of work and family, and present-day implications for the pipeline of future women leaders. Students consider the role of the School in addressing disparities both on campus and in the wider business world.

Iz-Lynn Chan, assistant director of retail business group and service quality and vice president of Far East retail consultancy for Far East Organization, a private real estate developer group in Singapore, raises service standards in the company's hospitality portfolio, Far East Hospitality. Chan and her small team in the Service Quality and Standards Department (SQSD) for Far East Organization apply to the Singapore government for the National Customer Centric Initiative (CCI) for Far East Hospitality. After being awarded the CCI, Chan must make some tough decisions about how to carry out the CCI. Despite Far East Hospitality's leading market share in mid-tier hotels and serviced residences, there had been a number of new entrants into the market and competition is fierce in Singapore's hospitality industry.

Tata Consultancy Services' (TCS) Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) division faces the challenge of retaining their Generation-Y employees, with seven out of a thirteen-person team quitting within a month. Workforce dynamics in the BPO industry in India are a high growth area and employees often have offers from several respected competing firms. In particular, the thriving industry has a great impact on Generation-Y in India, which makes up an increasingly large share of the workforce. To this end, TCS has made significant efforts towards both engaging their Generation-X employees and retaining their Generation-Y employees - leaving the human resource head, Jagdish Chaudhari wondering what more needed to be done after this latest episode.